Wowza流媒体云简化了实时事件设置

One of the more interesting announcements at last week’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas was the immediate availability of Wowza流媒体云. The announcement signals Wowza Media Systems’ intent to get in to the pay-as-you-stream cloud service space.

Wowza流媒体云允许用户轻松地设置一个实时事件, 供立即使用的或预定将来使用的, 然后通过一个定制的播放器传递这个事件. 我们将研究每一个步骤，以及与Wowza的集成 GoCoder，本文稍后将介绍.

The new Wowza流媒体云 is indicative of the company’s move towards overall simplification of live event setup and delivery. It’s also both a natural extension of the company’s Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon Web Services EC2 and a departure from it.

几年前, Wowza moved away from selling only perpetual licenses of Wowza Media Server that were used on customer-premise servers. For those who did not want to invest in multiple perpetual server licenses, or who needed to scale up server instances for particularly high demand during a major event, the EC2 approach offered a way to use AWS instances for one-off live events or larger video-on-demand (VOD) delivery needs.

但是，使用EC2需要进行相当多的设置. Users had to launch an EC2 instance pre-configured with a Wowza Amazon Machine Image (AMI), 配置Wowza AMI, 访问云中的Wowza流媒体引擎管理器, and run tests of the VOD application instance before adding content to the EC2 instance. The effort was worth it for larger-scale live events or peak demand of key VOD content, 但这对普通用户来说并不容易.

Wowza流媒体云 makes it much easier to set up and deliver live events. Once a customer signs up for an account, the online interface walks through each step of the way. Anyone familiar with the web-based user interface in Wowza Streaming Engine, 哪一种既有分步设置又有上下文帮助, 你会觉得Wowza流媒体云很熟悉吗.

在花在实际编码会话上的钱之前, Wowza流媒体云 allows for setup and customization of the player, 安排事件, 甚至为事件生成一个倒计时时钟.

最后一个特性, which can be rather helpful for a national or even international event that spans multiple time zones, lets potential participants know whether they’ve arrived at an event too early

“你要么提前安排好,” said Wowza vice president and streaming industry evangelist Chris Knowlton, “or you can go into your channel configuration—without needing to start the stream—a few minutes before you want the counter to appear in the embedded player. It’s as easy as setting the Countdown Clock option to Yes and specifying the event day and time.”

Knowlton did mention that the player update may take a few minutes to propagate to the CDN edges.

安装完成后, the Wowza流媒体云 customer has the option to begin the encoding session. 出现警告, 注意到服务费用将在此时开始累积, 基于特定实时事件的编码小时数.

进一步的配置也是可能的, 如果客户选择使用Wowza GoCoder应用程序. Knowlton and I tested this option during a recent demonstration, and it worked relatively flawlessly. Wowza流媒体云 generated a unique URL, which Knowlton emailed to my iPhone. 然后我启动了URL, 继而推出了GoCoder应用程序, and my iPhone’s stream soon appeared in the Wowza Stream Cloud as the primary stream.

What’s interesting about the GoCoder app integration with Wowza流媒体云 is that Knowlton was able to generate a second unique URL for himself, 然后从那个URL启动GoCoder, 取代我的GoCoder流.

虽然这不是一个功能, per se, it could be useful for a quick-and-dirty switch between devices if the only encoding devices available are mobile phones.

We found that GoCoder on the first device didn’t know it was no longer being streamed via Wowza流媒体云, but that starting and stopping GoCoder on the first device overrode the second device’s stream in terms of what was being presented to the audience in Wowza流媒体云. 所以要小心使用.

说到观众, the other portion of the service—delivery of the live event to the customized player—is the second area where the Wowza流媒体云 customer will incur charges. 该服务对编码会话小时收取统一费率, live stream consumption on the customized player is charged based on the number of gigabytes delivered.

这两种费用在现场活动期间都清楚地标记出来, 允许Wowza流媒体云客户管理他们的活动预算. 更低比特率的直播内容, 当然, 会消耗更少的总gb数吗, which means that some Wowza流媒体云 customers may choose to lower the overall encoding bitrate if they expect a large audience.

总之, Wowza流媒体云 offers a very easy method of setting up and delivering a live event.

Wowza一直致力于制作易于使用的媒体服务器, especially in the last year with the addition of the graphic user interface, Wowza流媒体云延续了这一传统. Whether other online video platforms—many of which use the Wowza Streaming Engine for their own live and VOD content delivery—consider Wowza流媒体云 unfair vendor competition remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: Wowza is setting a high bar for ease of use that other OVPs should emulate.